Friday, January 29, 2016

Sketching life...

Last night I met with a potential client. We met at a bar, after work, in the city, in what's known as Philadelphia's Gayborhood, Tavern onCamac, a place when they have a wonderful singer who plays the piano too, and I think she is the best in the city. I played flag football with the bartender at the place and he is a nice kid too. My potential client works with a non profit here in the city. She is a wonderfully quiet, reflective and peaceful African American trans woman. We talked about things, drank a little and left. We had agreed things were getting better, and we are excited about the possibilities. We have both been through many things and are still here. We hugged each other on the corner of 13th and Locust, right on the corner where so much crime had occurred through the years, a corner known for, among other things, the killing of Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. It's not far either from where a trans woman, Nizah Morris, went into a police car alive and was dumped out dead in 2002. But now there is mostly peace, and a place where we can hug, a white trans woman and a black trans woman. I met her because I have been working on a project -- a Complaint in a new lawsuit -- that has literally taken hundreds of hours, so far unpaid. I'm close to the end, which is good hopefully, because a positive resolution will have a wonderful, direct impact on hundreds of people, God Willing. It will also set precedent in a place American law has never been, despite all the years of jurisprudence and all the cases in the local, state and federal courts.In this case, the case (see what I did there) will likely be resolved soon too, so I won't have long to wait to find out whether the work will have been for a good cause or simply have been a waste. And at the most difficult times while I worked on it, I literally shook sometimes as I wrote, trying to put down the truth, and the justice and the need, but in ways that are understandable to the judge and his clerks, and would make them would look favorably on our case, and in ways that would make the other side concerned about the strength of our case. I had to fight myself too, my own emotions as I worked, since it's not just the culmination of many direct hours, but also raises issues that I have fought with myself my whole life.I hope to write about it here soon in more detail -- the end of the tunnel is approaching one way or another -- and I am terrified with the possibilities.